PBS last night ran a segment on the anti-war protests accompanying President Bush's sabre-rattling against Iraq. Against some video footage of the rally in DC, the public station reported on the "thousands" of protesters who took to the streets in our nation's capital. There was but one, brief overhead shot of part of the crowd surging down one of the capitol's broad avenues. The shot was gone before I could retrieve the remote from its hiding place, but clearly, the immense crowd in that short video easily numbered in the tens of thousands, if not more.

Organizers reported up to 500,000 people rallied in DC over the weekend, and there were smaller demonstrations all over the country, from Des Moines to San Francisco, but how many read about the demonstrations in their local newspaper? If the media were truly liberal, as some regulars here insist, then we would expect heavy, continuing coverage of these events, rather than what we see, which is spotty coverage downplaying the numbers, trivializing the motivations, and marginalizing the associations of those who raise their voices against the planned war.

Finally, I saw where someone came up with the average age of the protestors as being 21. Hmmm. We can't get accurate crowd counts of the demonstrators, but we can get their average ages.

Fair enough. Most of us are growing increasingly aware that the mainstream media kneels at the feet of their paymasters, and the truth be dammed.

sp